Month: May 2015

Breaking and Detecting Simulators and Emulators

binary codeI have read a few news items and blog posts recently about how various types of software running on top of virtual machines and emulators have managed to either break the emulators or at least detect their presence and self-destruct. This is a fascinating topic, as it touches on the deep principles of computing: just because a piece of software can be Turing-equivalent to a piece of hardware does not mean that software that goes looking for the differences won’t find any or won’t be able to behave differently on a simulator and on the real thing.

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Wind River Blog: Automating Targets with the Simics Agent

There is a new post at my Wind River blog, about the Simics Agent feature that we included in Simics last year. Took a while to get a blog out, as I had so many other things to write about. It was also nice to get a video demo out to accompany the post. The most interesting part about the Simics Agent to me is how much more convenient it is to script a target with an agent on the inside. Too bad that also changes the target software stack a bit — but I do think that that is OK most of the time. As always, the solution has to be designed with the end goal in mind, and there is no absolute right or wrong here. Read the blog post for more details!